There are several areas in the rose breeding hobby where record keeping is advantageous. Please keep in mind that although record keeping is not a requirement, doing so will cause your hobby to become richer for you as you discover interesting heritable relationships in your seedling roses.

Record keeping involves keeping track of the parents of your seedlings - who is the mother and who is the father; it involves recording data about the crosses themselves - number of hips produced, seeds per hip and germination rates seen in particular crosses; and it involves documenting seedling characteristics - including plant habit, disease resistance, repeat cycling of bloom, floriferousness, foliage color, shape, size and glossiness, bloom form, size, color, petal drop and fragrance, thorniness, fragrance of foliage, ability to produce hips, and ease of propagation - either by cuttings or grafting (among other characteristics). Also, record keeping should include recording our creative ideas. Most of us will periodically daydream about possible crosses. We should not neglect to write down our thoughts in a notebook when an idea comes to us, "I wonder what would happen if I crossed that clean yellow floribunda with that purple shrub?" And we should be careful to document important observations: "seedling E-63-1 has an outstanding red color with excellent exhibition form".

Recording seedling parents is important in order to follow trends and to select future crosses to obtain desirable recessive traits.

If you come up with a highly desirable seedling within a smaller lot of seedlings (lets say from among 25 seedlings from a given cross), it will be worthwhile to repeat the cross to a much larger extent so that you can evaluate 200 to 300 seedlings from that cross. By repeating the cross it is quite likely that you will discover an even more desirable seedling from that same combination of parents. Without records, you will be unable to purposefully redo previously successful crosses.

Additionally, if you are working with a recessive trait, trying to insert it into some of your new seedlings, it may take two or more generations to be successful. This is because recessive traits will usually be "hidden" in the first (F1) generation. In the second generation (F2), using the F1 seedlings that likely contain the recessive trait (though are not exhibiting the trait), you will have the opportunity to recover the recessive trait in some of the resulting F2 seedlings. If you don’t know who the parents are of your seedlings, you will not be able to set up crosses to get at recovering desirable recessive traits in subsequent generations.

In order to keep track of crosses, I have found it easiest to use small paper tags that are hole punched and strung with a string. These can be purchased at any stationery store. I buy them in bulk boxes containing 1,000 tags per box. The pollen parent is written on the tag in pencil (ink can either fade in the sun or wash off). I use a shortened "code" for the pollen parent, for example, ABD for ‘Abraham Darby’. This makes it easier to write out several tags when making a large number of crosses. I do not record the date (although in northern climates it might be preferable to do that), because I only harvest hips once they begin to turn color, or show other signs of ripening; and I do not record the female parent because the hip being attached to the mamma plant tells me that.

Later on though, when the hips are harvested, both parents must be recorded. In listing a cross, the female parent always goes first, followed by the pollen parent. I do this when I collect the ripe hips into zip-lock bags. All of the hips from a particular cross are stored in the same bag, while other crosses are stored separately in other zip-lock bags. I use a "permanent" laundry pen to write the cross on the zip-lock bags. A cross of ‘Lady of the Dawn’ (female parent) by ‘Abraham Darby’ (pollen parent) would be recorded as: LDY X ABD. Then later, usually in the early wintertime after the seeds have been removed from the hips and placed in damp paper towels and returned to the zip-lock bags, I will write out tags to be used at planting time. These are 4" X ½" yellow plastic tags that are tapered on the bottom. I write out the same cross as is on the zip-lock bag and place the tag in the bag (the plastic yellow tag will be used later in the seedling bed to label the row of seeds from that particular cross that are planted).

Finally, all of the crosses that are harvested are recorded into a spread sheet program (I use Microsoft Excel). Once you get used to cutting and pasting, recording your crosses in Excel can go quite fast. I record the parents, the number of hips and the number of seeds. Then I use Excel to calculate the number to seeds per hip. Later, after the seedlings have germinated, I can again use Excel to calculate the germination rates of each cross. This information is useful in subsequent seasons to select my most reliable parents. When using reliable parents, you can eliminate a lot of time wasted on infertile parents and your efficiency will go way up.

In the table below, the first 3 entries were experimental and not many pollinations were performed of those crosses.  As can be seen, 'Stainless Steel' X 'Gemini', only produce one hip containing only one seed - not a very good representation of the cross.  In fact, that seed did not germinate.  The last two entries are crosses that were repeated multiple times.  The cross 'Lynn Anderson' X ' ('Camara' X 'Kardinal') had initially been performed in the previous year and had resulted in several interesting seedlings.  For that reason, I extensively repeated the cross so that I ended up with 64 hips containing 1050 seeds this year.  With a larger volume of seeds, it is possible to fully evaluate the potential of a given cross.

Seed Parent	Pollen Parent	Hips	Seeds	Seeds/Hip	% Germ.
Stainless Steel	Sunset Celebration	1	14	14.00	57.1%
Stainless Steel	Gemini	1	1	1.00	0.0%
Stainless Steel	Olympiad	2	14	7.00	21.4%
Lynn Anderson	Veterans' Honor	25	298	11.92	46.6%
Lynn Anderson	(Camara X Kardinal)	64	1050	16.41	65.0%

To document seedling characteristics, something that I have found very handy, is to take notes for important seedlings while doing direct observations in the seedling test area using a handheld tape or digital audio recorder. It is easy to make voice recorded notes while operating the recording device with one hand. Your other hand can be used to hold your diagram of the seedling test area. This was not my own idea, but I noticed that it worked well for Tom Carruth of Weeks Roses when he evaluates his test seedlings in the field. Voice recorded notes may later be transcribed to your seedling database.

Another excellent tool to use is a digital camera. A picture is worth a thousand words and many times you will be able to capture subtleties about your seedlings with the camera that would be difficult to describe with words.  Additionally, months later when reviewing notes, the photo of the plant itself may help you to remember other seedling characteristics that otherwise were not noted.

The database that I am using is Microsoft Access. I have set up tables and forms in Access to insert specific seedling characteristics. Data could also be recorded in a spread sheet. Use whatever program with which you are most familiar.



As you can see from the image above, I have inserted a digital photo within the data form. This has been a good way to keep all of the seedling information together.

Now, if you don’t like computers (and even if you do decide to use computer spread sheets and data bases), don’t forget to keep notes in your spiral bound paper notebook. I still use a paper notebook to summarize my thoughts during the growing season and to record my brainstorming ideas for future crosses. Nothing will replace my paper notebook - but nothing will get recorded in it unless I take the time to regularly put down my observations about yesterday and my plans for tomorrow. If you haven’t kept notes on your rose breeding hobby, why not start today !